Summer of Fire - Linda Jacobs [71]
An updraft lifted and then dropped the chopper, causing Deering to bite his tongue. Swallowing the salt of blood, he said, “We’ve gotta turn back.”
Right now Deering was probably threading his chopper through turbulence, Clare figured. Last night she’d stayed with the Smokejumpers without letting him know she was in West Yellowstone. It had seemed the right thing, and today on the North Fork front, she was certain of it. Her anger at the fires, and at herself, still drawn to a man who lied, drove her like a dervish.
She kept one eye on the rising wind. It was just past ten and in two hours, they’d fallen back three times. In each case, Sergeant Travis had watched fire eat its way toward their line with his jaw thrust out. When embers flew a hundred feet ahead, he shouted and pointed for the troops to run down spot fires.
Gone for Clare was the pleasant exertion of hefting the Pulaski. No more the meditative lassitude of repetition. This day’s dry front was a fury.
She wondered what Steve saw from Mount Washburn. With the inversion broken so early, the sky must be filling with spectacular thunderheads rising to thirty or forty thousand feet. “Look out, Chance.” Travis pointed behind her with a smug look. If she had eyes in the back of her head, she’d have seen that once more their line had been defeated. No matter that Steve called this rebirth, it was a war.
Steve knelt beside a motionless cow elk. The North Fork had left a stark and colorless landscape, save for scattered cherry embers.
Pines stood stripped of their needles, bark transformed to charcoal. Despite his attention to the elk, Steve kept a wary eye on the snags, for the forty mile per hour wind could bring one down in an instant.
Behind him on the pavement of the closed highway, a group of tourists and firefighters watched from a distance of fifty feet. That wasn’t far enough, for he imagined he could feel their eyes on his back. He reached to check the cow for a pulse. Failing to find any, he touched a finger to the open, staring eye and got no reaction.
He bent to look and found the pupils fixed and dilated. He breathed relief, for the last thing the Park Service needed was for the public to witness an animal’s suffering. Of course, the press corps was no doubt on the way.
Steve believed in the natural rightness of wildfire and its rejuvenation of the land, but it was damned hard not to take this killing personally. His boots stirred a layer of ash as he walked toward the rest of the carcasses.
There were about thirty, the herd bull, a couple of younger males who had yet to challenge for the cows, and at least ten yearlings and calves. One of the spindly-legged young lay at the base of the tree it had trusted to shield it from the approaching inferno. Steve’s throat thickened.
There were a lot of stories about mass kills. Most were false. He had watched buffalo and elk graze with flames not fifty feet away. As fire approached, the animals usually moved calmly out of range.
It was damned uncommon, but something had gone terribly awry for this herd.
Steve studied their coats. Although they all rested inside an area that had been most thoroughly burned, he saw only a minor amount of singed hair. The powdery ash swirled and he could see the disturbance left by hooves.
Determined to investigate, Steve looked and found he was still in seclusion.
Pulling his folding lock blade knife, he thought this would be the easiest course. The dead calf’s coat was thinner and the trachea would not be as tough as in the more mature elk. Intending to steady the throat, he placed a hand on the soft hair and nearly lost his nerve. Tears swelled, blurring the landscape into uniform gray.
Steve blinked hard and swallowed. He ran his thumb along the knife-edge to test its sharpness. If he could just have a drink to steady himself . . .
He made the cut quickly.
Thick soot coated the vocal cords